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Mission Critical: China cracks down on rare earths leaks
China spent the trade truce quietly building an enforcement machine - a bounty hotline, detained foreign nationals and a company chairman in custody - just as a November deadline that could reactivate its export controls draws closer. On 1 July, with little fanfare, China's commerce ministry switched on a mechanism that pays informants to report anyone smuggling strategic minerals or dodging its export-licensing regime. The market read the week's rare earth story as a supply-tightness rally, with all eighteen elements tracked by Shanghai Metals Market climbing in July for the first time all year. That reading is fair enough, yet the bigger development was a change in how China plans to police the materials the West still cannot make for itself. For most of the past year, Beijing's leverage has come from writing rules: licensing catalogues, extraterritorial de minimis thresholds and dual-use lists that turned permanent magnets into a matter of national security. This week the emphasis moved from drafting those rules to enforcing them, with the machinery of customs, criminal law and public bounties now pointed at the grey channels through which controlled material has leaked out. The timing is no accident, given th
Mining
Mission Critical: The metals gap beneath the megawatts
Washington has put US$17.5 billion behind nuclear reactors to close its AI power deficit, but the metals that build both the grid and the machines still run through Chinese refineries as Beijing gallops ahead in power generation across all sectors. Azzet’s Mission Critical is a weekly column that lays out the ebbs and flows around critical minerals supply chains - from pricing, production, refinement and mergers & acquisitions, to energy, manufacturing and consumer products. The shorthand doing the rounds among energy strategists is the "electron gap", and the figures behind it are difficult to argue with. Since 2021, China has added more power generation capacity across every technology than the United States has built in its entire history, including 543 gigawatts in a single year, leaving it with a reserve margin American grid operators can only theorise about. That advantage explains the urgency behind last week's Department of Energy commitment of US$17.5 billion in conditional loans for ten Westinghouse reactors, with AI data centres named as the explicit demand driver. That framing, though, mistakes the symptom for the disease. Electrons (power) sit downstream of metal, and the wind turbines, transmission lin
Mining
Mission Critical: G7 deadline for China's rare earths grip
The Group of Seven leaders closed their summit at Évian-les-Bains on Wednesday by agreeing to set up a critical minerals alliance and a shared platform, handing the International Energy Agency an expanded role in flagging supply shocks before they bite. The headline pledge was a number rather than a project, with leaders committing to cut reliance on any single supplier outside the bloc to below 60% for rare earths and permanent magnets by 2030, and towards 50% as soon as conditions allow. Nobody named China in the communiqué, though the target leaves little doubt about which supplier the leaders had in mind. "We express our grave concerns regarding the use of non-market policies and practices and economic coercion, including arbitrary export restrictions and retaliatory measures on critical minerals and their related dual-use items, all of which undermine economic security and resilience," the G7 leaders said in their joint declaration.Source: AzzetWhat's changedLast year's framework, launched at Kananaskis under Canada's presidency, dealt mostly in principles, traceability and a roadmap towards what officials labelled standards-based markets for critical minerals. The Évian text goes considerably further, attaching a
Mining
Mission Critical: US$110 rare earths floor now a subsidy
Beijing's suspended export controls switch back on in November, weeks before Washington bans Chinese magnets from its weapons. With NdPr back near US$100/kg, the West's $110 floor is propping up producers at the taxpayer's expense. Rare-earth bulls spent April watching the one number that matters slide the wrong way. Praseodymium-neodymium (NdPr) oxide, the blended feedstock behind the magnets in electric-vehicle motors and wind turbines, fell from about $126/kg in early April to near $100/kg a month on, and by late May had steadied around $102-105/kg. That looked, on the surface, like the panic draining out of the market, with buyers no longer chasing material nobody could actually ship through 2025. Yet what the price chart leaves out is the calendar. Beijing agreed in late 2025 to suspend its harshest rare-earth controls for a single year, a pause now ticking down toward roughly 10 November 2026. Washington, on a separate track, has told defence contractors that Chinese-origin magnets are barred from qualifying weapons systems from 1 January next year. Those two dates land within weeks of each other, so China's leverage is scheduled to switch back on almost exactly as the Pentagon's deadline bites. Under
Mining
Silver's 140% rally is now killing its own demand
Silver's historic 2025 surge is now working against the metal, with analysts at three major banks warning that elevated prices are eroding demand across key industrial end-markets and leaving the metal exposed to further selling. Spot silver fell 3.7% to around US$72.13 per ounce (oz) on Thursday, extending a retreat that has seen prices shed roughly 40% from the January record high of $121.60/oz. A 140% rally across 2025 has been deterring buyers across multiple industries, with UBS warning in a note published on 22 May that elevated price levels are beginning to structurally weigh on consumption. "The demand erosion is likely to persist as long as prices remain at current levels," UBS analysts wrote. UBS strategists Wayne Gordon and Dominic Schnider estimate that weaker demand from photovoltaics, silverware, and jewellery will collectively reduce consumption by around 50 million ounces this year. The bank cut its full-year investment demand estimate from above 400 million oz to 300 million oz - which it described as "still generous given year-to-date outflows" - and slashed its year-end price target to $80/oz from $85 previously. The industrial demand erosion is the critical distinction between silver and gold

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Mission Critical: Japan hit as China curbs rare earths
Since December 2025, China has been running what amounts to a quiet rare earth blockade against Japan - not through formal diplomatic announcements, but through the systematic withdrawal of the materials that underpin everything from electric vehicle motors to missile guidance systems. Exports of dysprosium, terbium, yttrium oxide and gallium to Japan have all but stopped, confirmed by Reuters this week - five months of near-zero shipments, with Chinese customs data recording only trace yttrium volumes crossing the border in that time. The trigger is well-documented: Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi publicly signalled that Tokyo could respond militarily if China moved on Taiwan, and Beijing activated the export controls it has spent years quietly building into enforceable law. Japan imports roughly 70% of its rare earths from China according to the Yomiuri Shimbun - improved from near-total dependence in 2010 after years of costly diversification investment, though still far short of any position that can absorb a sustained cutoff of its highest-value inputs without industrial consequence.Not 2010 - something more deliberateSo how does 2026 differ from the last time Beijing ran this play? The short answer is that it is mo
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Mission Critical: The reagent wars have begun
For three years, Beijing progressively tightened access to the minerals Western supply chains depend on. In May 2026, it moved to the industrial chemicals needed to process them - a shift that sits within a broadening export control architecture now spanning the full breadth of the critical minerals value chain. While the world spent the last three years tracking China's restrictions on gallium, germanium, graphite, antimony, and rare earths, a separate category of exposure was building quietly in the background. Industrial chemicals - the reagents underpinning the extraction of those same materials - attracted comparatively little scrutiny from policymakers or financial analysts during that period, and the gap has now translated into measurable production costs for miners and processors supplying the energy transition. On 1 May this year, China formally suspended exports of industrial sulphuric acid, the chemical workhorse underpinning heap-leach copper extraction, HPAL nickel refining, uranium leaching, and the global phosphate fertiliser chain. Rather than a formal government announcement, the restriction was communicated through producer notifications and trade channel communications to international buyers, coveri
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Mission Critical: Will a Trump card win China's rare earths?
The first American President visit to China since 2017 has an uncomfortable subtext. Washington is now negotiating for access to minerals it has spent a year and billions of dollars trying not to need. Azzet’s Mission Critical is a weekly column that lays out the ebbs and flows around critical minerals supply chains - from pricing, production, refinement and mergers & acquisitions, to manufacturing and consumer products. President Trump landed in Beijing yesterday for a meeting that, whatever the communiqué language says on Friday, is fundamentally a negotiation over materials China controls and the rest of the world does not. Rare earths - the 17 metallic elements underpinning F-35 fighter jets, EV motors, and the magnets inside every offshore wind turbine - are confirmed on the summit agenda alongside Taiwan, Iran's disruption to global oil supply, and the chip access dispute that has run hot since Washington tightened technology transfer rules against Huawei in late 2025. Beijing set the tone before Air Force One touched down, publishing a new rare earth enforcement framework two weeks before the summit that introduces administrative penalties - including licence revocation - for Chinese producers who breach product
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Mission Critical: A US$5bn gamble on two geopolitical bets
Canberra and Washington have pledged more than US$5 billion to critical minerals projects in Australia this week, ahead of the 20 April six-month milestone under their October framework. Named priority recipients include Tronox, Ardea Resources, Arafura and Alcoa-Sojitz, backed by Export Finance Australia and the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Catch is, the framework's forward economics depend on two geopolitical deadlines, and neither is locked in. Beijing has to keep its rare earth export controls suspended past November, while Trump needs a price floor deal signed before the 13 July cutoff.Where the capital is headingMinister for Resources Madeleine King and US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum confirmed priority projects under the bilateral framework on 13 April. The biggest single cheque landed with Tronox (NYSE: TROX), which picked up coordinated letters of support worth around US$849 million for a new Western Australian rare earths refinery. Close behind, Ardea Resources (ASX: ARL) drew roughly A$1 billion of combined backing for its Kalgoorlie nickel-cobalt project - the largest nickel-cobalt resource in Australia. Arafura Rare Earths (ASX: ARU) held onto its marquee position, with the Nolans project remai